Knowledge that Transforms

University-sponsored family business programs act as important sources of continuing education and information for family businesses. In spite of rapid growth of such programs, relatively little research has focused on member satisfaction and member perceptions of program usefulness and quality. This study is the first to actively seek the cooperation of administrators and members of family business programs to study issues of content, program attributes, and member perceptions. Using 333 member responses (36% response rate) from 21 university-sponsored programs, perceptions of program content, usefulness, and satisfaction are analyzed. Results provide insight for program directors about how to run programs that best meet the needs of member families.

We investigate how changing technological and industry conditions in emerging markets, driven by product innovation, affect the exit rates of start-up versus established firms. We find that these changing conditions have different outcomes for start-up and established firms. We assert that the higher rates of exit for start-ups compared to established firms is due to start-up firms' lower ability to adapt both to technology and industry changes that occur with technological progress. We test this assertion by comparing the rate of exit of start-up firms to established firms that entered the U.S. personal computer market between 1975 and 1988.

It has been acknowledged that firms must resort to technology in order to acquire the flexibility needed to meet the challenges posed by the globalization of the economy. The successful adoption of new technology has thus become a matter of survival for companies. Several studies have already highlighted the importance of the manager's behavior in the process of adopting technology. The Stevenson model suggests that this behavior may be situated anywhere on a continuum ranging from the characteristics of the administrator, at one extreme, to those of the entrepreneur, at the other. Using this model, we conducted a study of senior managers to analyze their behavior in the decision to adopt a new technology. A questionnaire was mailed to 450 of them and in-depth interviews were conducted among 54 others. Our findings show that in the process of adopting a new technology, half the managers adopted a behavior closer to that of an administrator. The other half acted more like entrepreneurs. This seems to have a major impact on the success of the adoption since we found that managers with an entrepreneurial style were not as successful as those who adopt an administrative style.

Welbourne and Andrews (1996) studied IPO firms and found that Tobin's Q, at the time of the IPO, was lower for firms that they coded as having higher levels of human resource value (HR Value). However, those same firms were more likely to survive five years after the IPO. Given that finding, this study examines one factor that may influence the firm's choice between maximizing short-term financial performance (doing well at the IPO) or long-term performance (maximizing HR value). Using the theory of upper echelons (Hambrick & Mason, 1984), we show that the decision on how to balance these forces is shaped in part by the chief executive officer's (CEO) functional background. We focus on CEOs with primary training in finance because they will most closely identify with investment community pressures to perform well at the time of the IPO. In two different samples of IPO firms, we find that the CEO's financial background is associated with lower levels of human resource value, but, contrary to what we expected, having a finance-oriented CEO does not maximize short-term gains in the IPO.

In this study, 15 success versus failure variables were tested for differences between U.S. and Central Eastern Europe Croatian (CEEC) entrepreneurs. Nine of the values were significantly different at the .05 level and two at the .10 level (73%). U.S. Entrepreneurs started with greater capital, had more years of management experience, developed more detailed planning, made greater use of professional advice, had more college graduates, sold products with better product life-cycle timing, started their business during better economic times, were older, included more partnerships, and had more parents who owned a business than CEEC entrepreneurs, while CEEC entrepreneurs had an easier time staffing than U.S. entrepreneurs. The Lussier (1995) U.S. success versus failure prediction model was tested using logistic regression (S/F = f staffing, education, use of professional advice, planning) and it was also a significant predictor in CEEC. The findings should help lead to redefining entrepreneurship in CEEC, as many of its countries commonly believe that human resources have little to do with business success and failure. As the view of human resources changes, more resources should be allocated to develop employees.